1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a feeder for feeding products to be dispatched, such as, for instance, documents, periodicals, CDs, DVDs, and the like, to a conveyor of a packaging line, provided with transport pushers, the feeder being provided with a magazine for storing a stack of products, the dimensions of the magazine being settable through the setting of guides.
2. Description of Background art
Such a feeder is known from practice and is marketed by applicant. Descriptions are to be found, for instance, in the operating manual of the RF4-Feeder and in the operating manual of the “Big Foot” Shuttle Feeder, both of Buhrs-Zaandam The RF4-Feeder is a so-called drum feeder, whereby each time the bottommost product of a stack of products present in the magazine is pulled loose and is transported downwards via a gripper drum to be delivered there onto a conveying surface along which the transport pushers of the conveyor travel. In the case of a shuttle feeder such as, for instance, the Big Foot Shuttle Feeder of Buhrs-Zaandam, each time the bottommost product of a stack of products present in the magazine is transported forwards by means of a sliding table and discharged by further conveying means, such as, for instance, conveyor wheels and/or conveyor belts, to a lower conveying surface along which the transport pushers of a conveyor of a packaging line travel.
In the known apparatuses, the guides of the magazine are set manually, so that they match the dimensions of the product to be processed by the feeder. In the known apparatuses, it is of great importance that the moment of delivery of the product by a feeder be accurately geared to the position of a passing transport pusher, since the product should not end up on a transport pusher or far ahead of a transport pusher, but should be deposited onto the conveying surface with a trailing edge shortly before a transport pusher, so that the traveling speed of the product is substantially preserved and a reliable further conveyance of the product is effected. In practice, to that end, in the feeders according to the prior art, a number of operations are to be performed, whereby each feeder, in the so-called toggle position, which is a kind of test position, is phased to the conveyor by manual adjustment of a potentiometer. This needs to be performed for every feeder, which is a time consuming job which is at the expense of the production time of the packaging line.
It is known per se to store the product dimensions in the database of the control of the packaging line, so that these data can already be taken into account when setting the feeders. A drawback of this known method is that in practice it happens regularly that the data in the database do not correspond to the actual sizes of the documents. In practice, therefore, mostly the dimensions of the products are first measured and entered in the database, after which the subsequent setting and synchronization with the conveyor can take place automatically.